welcome to peeposite

girls will literally make a website from scratch instead of going to therapy.

haha we joke here, that’s not about me. but the more things i add to this site, the more you might suspect it is about me. i kind of wanted to break the ice by making my first blog post about why i even decided to make this site.

many years ago, probably around 2008 or so, i was so obsessed with sozai sites. cute little custom pixel layouts and "vector" graphics and toyboxes and cute subdomain names and "affies" and all that. i’d browse them all the time and keep lists of my favorite sites. i’ve been an artist since around that time, doodling in MS paint with a mouse and making dinky little pixel art in the beginning. i was just a kid, but it nourished my artistic soul. to those who aren’t familiar: i’m not even sure i could meaningfully explain this community to you because we are so far gone from that time now. but i know a chunk of people who are riding the nouveau oldweb wave know exactly what i’m talking about, so welcome!

since then, a lot of those sites have been lost. it makes me really sad, actually. i know you can go in with the wayback machine and check some out still, but it is by no means the same. nothing will ever be, because that was then, and this is now. in the grand scheme of things, it has not been long, but in internet years, it’s been centuries. and even i am not the same anymore! i wanted to make a site just like that back then, and that hasn’t really changed, but i want it a bit differently now. back then it was all i had to occupy my time, now i have 5000 other adult things to do. and more to offer than only pretty pixels. i do still love those though

my story likely sounds familiar to everyone who bothers to stumble upon a site like this. we all miss the act of being creative while social media standardizes your profile and makes the choices for you. the rise of generative AI which seeks to smother intentional creative expression. i can see it in these new indie sites i discover each day that are so creative, so full of genuine human emotion, and nowhere near the conventional delivery of a modern website.

deviantart and tumblr were my personal last hurrahs, the few places where you could truly make your page your own. but i left those sites years ago. it feels like we fell into the easy and soul-suppressing path somewhere. i can't even blame anyone. it’s so convenient, in the best ways. i believe web modernization was destined in order to eventually spawn google maps, which i’d die without. i don’t even mean to be a doomer about all this, okay!!!

i also kind of miss writing. i don’t think myself a very good writer, but i at least like to get my thoughts down. i used to journal a lot as a kid, since around 2012 onwards. i have hundreds of digital journal entries (maybe i could even write about that) detailing my days and my feelings and my obstacles of the times. but again, as adult life pushes on, i get busy. i haven’t regularly journalled at all until recently. something about a site where i’ve already put so much effort makes me want to keep putting in effort. i’m tired, but not too tired! after all, one of the great things about the indie web is that it’s for yourself, but it’s also something that gains a lot of meaning by being shared with others. if no one ever looked at my site, i’d be okay. i’m a lonely soul at heart. but it’s a little nice to at least imagine that maybe someone else who likes this sorta thing is out there seeing me too, even if it’s only the “me” that you see in the site layout that i put my heart into.

so like, ok but why did i make this site?

i actually picked up html & css again last year. i learned a little as a kid, but not really in a coherent way. i’ve been enjoying my relearning though. so much stuff to look into. things i never knew before because i picked things up without any context at all. i still don’t know javascript though and i’m too scared to open that can of worms.

i saw a friend of mine created a simple little website on neocities. he’s an artist, so he just wanted to have a place to put some info for commissions/OCs/etc. it’s really a cute site, and it looks so him. when i saw it, this thought rattled around in the back of my head. “haven’t you thought off-handedly about making a site like this?”. and then i thought about it the whole day. and then the next day, i was logged into neocities (turns out i had made an account before) and was busy concepting my layout. strike while the iron is hot or something. and i get bored of things fast, i do. but the iron still feels hot. and i love it when i feel that way about something, because i usually find myself frustrated by my lack of follow-through.

so i made my site for fun, and to scratch an itch that was bothering me. but then i maybe discovered that the itch was much bigger and much deeper than i previously thought, and that this might be something that could be meaningful to me. i’m never really sure what i even like or enjoy. i have few hobbies, i don’t do many activities or hang out with friends with any sort of regularity. i’m like a little dandelion puff floating on the wind. not going anywhere, not meaning anything. and i don’t mean that in a necessarily sad way. simply in a very neutral way. dandelion puffs don’t get passionate about things, after all!

the more i’ve worked on my layout, my pages, come up with new ideas, gotten excited, drafted some blog post ideas… the more i realize this really feels right for me, at this moment in life. i just sat down and wrote all of this in one unbroken stream of consciousness. i probably won’t even edit it much. it just feels right!